Use of the KADS Knowledge-Acquisition Method to Model the ONCOCIN task of Cancer-Chemotherapy Administration

Abstract:
In recent years, builders of expert systems have become increasingly
interested in the Knowledge Acquisition and Design Structuring (KADS) method
of knowledge acquisition. Despite the apparent face validity of the KADS
approach, reports of the use of KADS to develop large application systems are
virtually non-existent. We used KADS to model the task of cancer-chemotherapy
administration performed by ONCOCIN, a large medical expert system developed
at Stanford University in the 1980s. Based on a knowledge-level description
of ONCOCIN and on a review of the features of KADS, we developed K-OCOCIN, a
model of the ONCOCIN cancer-chemotherapy task that can be understood in terms
of the four layers required by the KADS approach.
In this paper, we offer a detailed description of the elements and layers of
the K-OCOCIN conceptual model. We also describe briefly a design model that
implements K-OCOCIN as a functional expert system. The K-OCOCIN model
provides a data point for understanding the strengths and limitations of the
KADS method when applied to a complex domain task.